PlanetSide 2: First details, concept art and screenshots revealed

Although PlanetSide fans have known about the possibility of a sequel to the popular massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game – which was first launched back in May 2003 – for quite some time now, nothing had actually been made official until now. Not only did Sony Online Entertainment officially announce the PlanetSide 2 game recently, they also revealed the first details, concept art, screenshots and trailer.

According to a recent pcgamer.com article by Josh Augustine, the PlanetSide 2 game is being built in the brand new Forge Light engine, which the developer has built in-house from scratch specifically for PlanetSide and EQ Next. The upcoming sequel is in fact a ‘reimagining’ of the original PlanetSide game, set at roughly the same time as the first game with the same world and the same factions.

The key elements of the first game will make a return in PlanetSide 2, including enormous battles with hundreds of players taking part either on foot or in land and air vehicles (there will be 15 different types) and free-form character customization that enables players to specialize in specific roles. Players will also have the ability to swap classes in between deaths, which basically act like armor / weapon loadouts.

Most of the customization is done through the incredibly large skill trees. Each class (Medic, Infiltrator, Heavy Weapons, and Engineer etc) has its own skill page, which is built up of a series of sub-trees that enables players to specialize in specific activities by customizing how their vehicles and weapons function. If for example they like piloting the Mosquito fighter, they will be able to upgrade its handling, armor or damage.

Outfits (known as clans in other first-person shooter games) will have their own skill trees to unlock and specialize. PlanetSide 2’s territory is controlled by capturing a certain facility on that territory. Unlike the original PlanetSide game, players will be able to capture any territory at any time. However, they do get significant bonuses if they capture a territory that is adjacent to their own.

As Josh Augustine notes in another article, the PlanetSide 2 game originally started as a free-to-play graphical update to the original game. However, once the team began working on the project, they decided to make it into a fully-fledged sequel instead. Once the developer reached this decision, they began building a new graphics engine from scratch to support the upcoming MMOFPS.

We have embedded the debut trailer below this post, so you can see just how awesome this game really looks. The screenshots and concept art can be viewed over on the pcgamer.com link here. Are you looking forward to playing the PlanetSide 2 game?